Archive for the 'Tuskegee Airmen' Category

On April 13, the Alabama Historical Association honored NewSouth Books authors Dan Haulman and Mary Ann Neeley with awards acknowledging their scholarship and contribution to state history.

Haulman received the Milo B. Howard award for his article “The Tuskegee Airmen and the ‘Never Lost A Bomber’ Myth,’” published in the January 2011 Alabama Review and then released as an ebook by NewSouth Books. Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, told The Montgomery Advertiser that Haulman was “an amazing researcher.”

In the introduction to his ebook, Haulman discusses how disproving the Airmen’s perfect record initially seemed controversial to other historians, but they came to understand that by verifying the Airmen’s record, history would be better able to appreciate the Airmen’s accomplishments overall.

Neeley received the Clinton Jackson Coley Award for her book The Works of Matthew Blue, Montgomery’s First Historian. She told the Alabama Historical Association’s Martin Olliff in an interview that she finds Matthew Blue an interesting historical figure because it was only after he lost his influential job as Montgomery postmaster that he began documenting the history of the city — Blue’s loss, in essence, was history’s gain.

The Alabama Review’s Leah Rawls Atkins said Neeley’s revival of Blue’s works, extensively annotated in Neeley’s book, “should be in major research libraries in the nation and included in most of Alabama’s public and academic collections.”

Congratulations to both our authors for their accomplishments.

* Mary Ann Neeley’s The Works of Matthew Blue, Montgomery’s First Historian is available in hardcover from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

Books by Dan Haulman:

* The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949, by Haulman, Joe Caver, and Jerome Ennels, is available in hardcover from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen is available in paperback and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

With the premiere of George Lucas’s new movie Red Tails, there’s a renewed interest in the Tuskegee Airmen who trained in Alabama.

In recognition of this important movie, NewSouth has released new print and ebook titles by military historian Daniel Haulman exploring common misconceptions about the Tuskegee Airmen, coinciding with our book The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 by Haulman, Joseph Caver, and Jerome Ennels.

As Haulman writes in his introduction to What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails, “For anyone who wants to know what in the Red Tails movie is not historically accurate, I have noted some cases. This list of differences between the Red Tails depiction of the Tuskegee Airmen and the real Tuskegee Airmen story is not intended to denigrate the movie — Red Tails is dramatic and thrilling and is a great contribution to the depiction of black servicemen in World War II — but merely to caution those who might mistakenly take the fictional account as history.”

The Airmen commander, for instance, never demanded that the Airmen be able to trade their old planes for new ones as depicted in the movie; the Airmen also did not protect the bombers alone in Berlin. These differences and more Haulman points out with praise for the Red Tails movie but with an eye toward historical accuracy for interested readers.

Haulman’s Red Tails title joins two others: Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen (available in print and ebook) and The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth (ebook exclusive). These books look at additional “myths” that have cropped up around the legend of the Tuskegee Airmen, including the myth that the Tuskegee Airmen were the first to shoot down German jets, and that the Airmen once robbed an Allied train to get fuel tanks for their planes.

These three books serve as handy companions both to the Red Tails movie, and to the Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History book written by Haulman, Caver, and Ennels. The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History is a lush, detailed volume that spotlights not just the pilots themselves, but also the doctors, nurses, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, and parachute riggers who contributed to the Airmen’s success. The book includes hundreds of photographs of the Airmen, many never before published, to truly bring the triumphs and struggles of the Tuskegee Airmen to life.

CNN included a number of these photographs in their story “A midair courtship: Tuskegee’s historic love story,” which profiles Herbert Carter and Mildred Hemmons. Carter was a Tuskegee Airmen and Hemmons one of the first black women in Alabama to receive a pilot’s license, who later worked as a civilian at the Tuskegee airfield. CNN details their romance and also how they broke racial barriers, including when Hemmons was photographed with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt after flying her plane.

Lt. Col. Carter appeared with Tuskegee Airmen authors Caver, Ennels, and Haulman decades later at the release of the book in 2011.

In a glowing article, The Montgomery Advertiser’s Al Benn praises NewSouth Books’ new title The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 as “the best of the batch” of books on the Airmen “because it takes a different approach” to the story of this famed military unit. Benn enthusiastically describes the book as “an encyclopedia crammed with everything you ever wanted to know about the organization” and notes that “the best part is that it is home-grown,” being authored by three historian/archivists from Maxwell Air Force Base, whose access to hundreds of historical documents “helped them to produce a superb 230-page book.”

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 had its launch party on May 5 at The NewSouth Bookstore on South Court Street in Montgomery. Authors Joseph Caver, Jerome Ennels, and Daniel Haulman were delighted to be joined by Airmen veteran Lt. Col. Herbert Carter, who had been a member of the 99th Fighter Squadron. Lt. Col. Carter is prominently featured in the book. In his Advertiser story, Al Benn identifies Carter’s photos as being among his personal favorites. The veteran pilot delighted guests by signing copies of the book along with the authors.

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 goes further than previous publications, using captioned photographs–many never published before–to trace the Airmen through their various stages of training, deployment, and combat. It also showcases the work of the Airmen’s diverse ground personnel. The book is the first to contain a detailed chronology of the Airmen’s wartime missions.

Interest in the Airmen continues to grow, with major motion picture due out next year from director George Lucas, and many books on the topic already in existence. The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 stands as the most comprehensive treatment of this distinguished group of pilots and the crews who supported them.

The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite retail or online book seller.